In today's popularity of open-world games, not only more and more big manufacturers will choose the open world category, but many independent games also have good works. However, most open-world games tend to add to the breadth and depth of gameplay, so many of these games have more complex gameplay. From this point of view, Crystarise can be called a relatively alternative open-world game.
In fact, for a game, simple gameplay can also bring long-term happiness, which is especially evident in Crystarise. As an open-world game, Crystarise's gameplay is perhaps simpler than most similar games, the threshold is extremely friendly, the gameplay is relatively light, and it is very casual - of course, if you want liver, liver emperor is also useful.
In this work, players need to collect resources by venturing in the world, build various facilities on their own sky island, and these facilities on the sky island can provide our protagonist with attribute bonuses, allowing us to gain stronger survival and combat ability when we adventure in the world, and the ultimate goal is to explore all areas and defeat the bosses of each area. The overall logic and system design of the game are relatively simple and easy to understand, and the player's fun mainly comes from two points: on the one hand, it is explored in the vast open world, which also includes the content of collecting gameplay, including the construction of Sky Island is essentially a manifestation of collection gameplay, which will be detailed later; On the other hand, there is the sense of achievement brought by the victory of battles, especially boss battles, after all, the ultimate goal of this game is to defeat all bosses.
Let's start with exploration and collecting gameplay. In the game "Crystarise", the player's hometown is Sky Island, which is our absolutely safe base, and the protagonist is naturally the owner of the island, responsible for building it little by little and making it more and more fleshing out. The world we go to adventure is full of unknown areas to explore, and all kinds of creatures that will attack us. The first area we explore is the grassland, which is systematic, but everything that follows is up to us to explore. In addition to grasslands, there are various terrains such as water surfaces, snowfields, deserts, volcanoes, etc. However, it should be noted that only the grassland terrain does not have a DEBUFF for us, the water surface terrain will make our movement speed extremely slow, and the snow field and volcano will make us continue to lose health due to low and high temperatures.
Since the game's health mechanic uses the most classic heart-type count instead of health bars, once the health is reduced, it will soon die if the upper limit of the previous health is low. The desert terrain is similar, because the desert is also a high temperature area, but due to the existence of the day and night system, the desert temperature at night is not high, so we will not continue to shed blood when entering the desert at night, which is quite reasonable. We can explore the world to find materials to unlock facilities, and when we return to Sky Island, we can unlock some facilities that cancel out the terrain DEBUFF, increase our water surface anti-slip attribute, or cold and heat resistance attribute, so that we can explore those areas that are difficult to enter in the early stage in the middle and late stages.
Each area will have a unique ecosystem of flora and fauna, and we can collect resources and battles through attacks, which are designed with the same action system and make the game's threshold more friendly. More importantly, the battle of this work has a total of four buttons, one dodge, one skill, the other two are melee general attack and long-range shooting, although these two are also counted as skills in the game, but in fact, most of the time we only need to master the position, dodge the attacks of monsters, and then use long-range shooting or melee draw A can cope with almost all battles, so the combat system design of this work can be said to be minimalist, even handicapped players can master. Defeating monsters will get dropped materials, breaking trees will get wood (and in the case of apple trees, you will get apples that replenish blood), breaking stones will get stone, and so on. The purpose of collecting materials is naturally to build facilities on Sky Island, which can provide the terrain resistance mentioned earlier, as well as various attribute bonuses, such as the materials we collect when we defeat flying monsters to unlock some facilities, which can provide us with damage bonuses for long-range shots and additional damage to flying monsters. Combat and facility construction can be seen as one, both providing us with growth, and the facility construction of Sky Island can also make us feel the satisfaction of collecting and growing.
Boss battles are the highlight of this game, but due to the simple design of the combat system, the main difficulty of boss battles lies in whether we keep up with our growth progress and pay attention to dodging when fighting. In the later stage, there will be some ways to increase the output of bosses, such as we can unlock facilities that increase boss crit by exploring the world and collecting materials. Boss battles require us to find an altar in a certain area in the process of exploring the world, for example, the first boss "King Jilulu" is the boss of the grassland area that we first began to explore, we explore in this terrain area of the grassland, we can find the altar, after offering the corresponding sacrifice according to the needs of the altar, the altar will summon the boss, and after defeating, it can advance the game process, and allow us to unlock more facilities to make the construction of Sky Island go further.
The process of defeating all the bosses is long, but the gameplay is mild, so we can play it as if it were a casual game. If you want to clear the level quickly, you need liver materials to unlock more facilities so that the protagonist can gain attribute growth, and then explore more terrain and find the altar, the sacrifices required for the altar also need liver, there will be some dungeon copies in the world to provide us with a lot of advanced resources, so the liver emperor also has the game of the liver emperor, that is, collect more materials, explore the world more, look everywhere for the entrance to the dungeon copy and clear the dungeon to get treasure chests to obtain advanced resources. In short, this is a game where both casual gameplay and liver emperor gameplay can have their own fun.
If you are a fan of open-world games, then Crystarise is a game that allows you to experience a refreshing and simple feeling, which is a completely different new feeling than those heavy open-world games; If you're a newcomer who wants to get into an open-world game, then Crystarise is more suitable for you, because it has an extremely friendly threshold to get started, but it has the core that an open world should have, and the cute art style will also make you linger. The game is currently in the EA (Early Access) stage of the Steam platform, and the subsequent updates are very worth looking forward to.